Articles Tagged "Green Cars"

Mitt Romney quipped in the first Presidential debate that the problem with the Obama Administration’s green energy investing isn’t that it tried to pick winners and losers, but that “you pick the losers.” He was being generous. Another big green Administration favorite went belly-up on Tuesday with the Chapter 11 filing by battery-maker A123 Systems Inc.

Massachusetts-based A123 is — or was — part of President Obama’s grand design to build a U.S. electric-car industry more or less from scratch. The company was founded by entrepreneurs in 2001 to make lithium ion phosphate batteries and attracted private investment from the likes of Sequoia Capital and GE. Then Washington picked up the green energy fad.

As Mr. Obama put it in August 2009, the government would create an “infrastructure of innovation” by doling out “$2.4 billion in highly competitive grants to develop the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks, powered by the next generation of battery technologies, all made right here in the U.S. of A.”

With whisper-quiet electric cars set to proliferate, the motor industry is under pressure to give them an artificial noise for safety purposes, but should they sound like traditional petrol vehicles?

It is an unsettling experience watching a car drive around, hearing little more than the whisper of the wind it generates as it glides down the road.

There would have been little time to get out of its way had it gone unseen.

Such a moment is the essence of the debate over how electric and hydrogen fuel cars should sound in the future.

The answer could determine how different cities could sound in 10 or 20 years. The rise of the electric car presents a rare opportunity to tackle the persistent roar of traffic that many city dwellers are used to.

Drivers who took the Government’s advice and chose a low-emission car could be left with a white elephant after a U-turn by ministers.

Britain’s biggest supplier of biofuels will announce today that it is closing its pumps because the Government is ending financial support from April.

It is the second time in five years that the Government has changed its mind and cancelled subsidies after encouraging motorists to invest in a particular type of green car.

In 2005 it withdrew grants for drivers to convert their cars to LPG. Now motoring groups are advising drivers to think very carefully before accepting Government grants for electric cars because ministers’ current enthusiasm for them may not last.

The environmental benefits of electric cars are being questioned in Germany by a surprising actor: the green movement. But those risks don't apply in the U.S., the American electric-car lobby asserts.

The German branch of the environmental group World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has conducted a study together with IZES, a German institute for future energy systems, on the environmental impact of electric vehicles in Germany.

Just like the U.S., Germany has an ambitious goal of introducing electric vehicles. Germany, which today has 41 million cars, aims to have 1 million electric cars or plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2020. The conclusion of the study is that these electric cars only reduce greenhouse gases marginally.

The study, which was published in German in March, has not been widely circulated in English yet. The WWF Germany said a summary in English is set for publication this summer.

» How much "Man Made" CO2 Is In The Earth's Atmosphere?
I think ALL of the CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere is from man.
I'm not sure how much "Man Made" CO2 is in the Earth's Atmosphere.
There is .04% CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere and of that "Man" has added an extra 4% (1 part in 62,500)